Jiayuguan, A Total Eclipse and The Last Fort Under Heaven: The Chinese Silk Road Part 2

The Yellow River, the Huang He (or Hwang Ho in my old school text book), tumbles out of the Tibetan massif and has its first major brush with Han civilization at Lanzhou. If it then took a straightforward route to the sea it would be a long but not a great river. With one eye firmly on its position in the world league table (usually sixth at around 5500 km) it sets off on an immense northerly detour, reaching deep into Inner Mongolia before turning back south towards, though never quite reaching, Xi’an.

Although both Xi’an and Lanzhou lie in the Yellow River Valley, it is obvious why the connecting railway does not follow the river. At least it does not follow the Yellow River, but sets off west along its much more modest tributary the Wei He.

We start with an overnight train journey from Xi'an to Jiayuguang (ringed in red) via Lanzhou

The track traverses a strange flat plateau between low hills. The land is heavily cultivated and although we passed few centres of population, we saw many people labouring in the fields. The work was hard and manual, power being supplied by animals more often than tractors. For many miles the Wei He runs in a small gorge some hundred metres across and ten deep, as though a slit had been cut through the land and the river dropped into it. When occasionally the gorge meandered or widened we could see cultivation continuing right down to river level; any land that could be planted had been planted.

The Wei He in its nrrow gorge

Eventually we left the Wei He, and without a noticeable rise or fall found ourselves at Lanzhou.

There are dozens of cities in China I am not entirely sure I have heard of, and then discover they are home to several million people. Lanzhou is one such city. Thirty kilometres of industrial ugliness smeared along the riverbank, the capital of Gansu Province looks like most other Chinese cities, and its railway station could be anywhere, particularly as there are precious few signboards saying Lanzhou in Chinese or pinyin.

For a while we ran beside the Yellow River - which was actualy muddy brown.

The Huang He (Yellow River) near Lanzhou

Our route followed the Hexi corridor, the main access – or in our case exit - to the Han Chinese heartland from the wilds of Central Asia. As night fell we entered the Gobi desert, the change from well-watered farmland to scrub passing unseen. We were asleep as the train thundered towards what the Chinese once thought of as the very edge of civilization, yet not very deeply asleep – our arrival at Jiayuguan was scheduled for a few minutes after four o’clock.

We were awake before the carriage attendant came to warn us. Our Japanese companions slept, or pretend to sleep, through the inevitable disruption. Clearly, they had succeeded in booking direct to Dunhuang.

Jiayuguan is a small, modern city with big wide streets on the inevitable grid plan. They were empty as Mr Lu drove us to our hotel on the southern edge of town. ‘The whole city is only forty years old,’ our guide Orlando told us. ‘Never mind,’ we said, ‘we’re only here for the eclipse’.

Version 1 of our itinerary had taken us, like our erstwhile Japanese companions, straight to Dunhuang. Then I learned that in early August a total eclipse would cut a swathe across northern China we changed our dates and introduced a stop in Jiayuguan which was just inside the path of totality.

Orlando looked perplexed, giving the impression that she was unaware of any eclipse. That was worrying, had we come to the wrong place?. I did not then know she had spent the previous day escorting an Indian couple from Dunhuang to Hami and had arrived in Jiayuguan only a little before us. We had had little sleep, she had had none and had every excuse for seeming dozy.

Orlando seemed a strange name for a young woman. She had told us her Chinese name, but with my wooden ear and stiff tongue I was grateful that, like most Chinese who come into regular contact with Europeans, she had an adopted western name. But why Orlando? It seemed rude to ask, but our daughter had taught English in a Chinese kindergarten and part of her job was assigning names. She had one class with all Welsh names, little Chinese Rhiannons and Gethins, and another named after the characters in a particular long running soap opera. Doubtless Orlando’s teacher had something in mind when he or she parcelled out the names, and it was probably not their charge’s future career.

Our hotel was new and wanted to be smarter than its three-star designation, but was let down by attention to detail. The receptionist was lounging in the foyer when we arrived; she climbed over her desk to check us in.

Several hours later, after an attempt at sleep, we shared a cold breakfast – nobody had put lights under the warming dishes - with a dozen or more Germans all earnestly talking astronomy. Clearly we were in the right place.

As we finished a rested and much more clued up Orlando arrived. She suggested that around six o’clock we should drive out to some sixth century tombs in the desert to see the wall paintings and then stay for the eclipse. The desert, she explained, was absolutely flat and although the sun would not be very high, we should have no visibility problems. We agreed a price for the jaunt and wandered off to explore Jiayuguan.

It was rush hour, but the big wide streets were still deserted. South of our hotel a forest of cranes was throwing up yet more apartment blocks with the usual Chinese haste. Beyond this we could see the desert rising to an area of heavily eroded badlands and beyond that the snow-capped Qilian mountains.

Cranes, badlands and the Qilian Mountains
Jiayuguan

Our hotel was beside a wide boulevard. On a road off to the north we spotted a mosque, not the first we had seen in China, but the first built in Middle Eastern, or at least Central Asian style. We crossed the empty boulevard and headed towards it.

This almost equally wide street was lined with weeping willows. The shade was welcome though the air was much drier than in Shanghai or Xi’an and the heat was agreeable rather than oppressive. Dry or not, there were several clouds above us, and more over the mountains; if they moved across they would seriously threaten our view of the eclipse. The pavements were awaiting construction and covered with rubble, but walking in the road was not dangerous. Being used to the population pressure which defines most Chinese cities, it was strange to walk round a town which seemed, if not empty, at least under-populated.

Before reaching the mosque, we were seduced by a market laid out on a side road leading towards open spaces and an area of low-rise dwellings. Melons, peaches, squash, tomatoes, a whole variety of cabbages, elongated aubergines, leeks, spring onions and the freshest plumpest ginger roots imaginable were arranged along the roadside, the stallholders sitting on the ground under tatty umbrellas. The quality looked good and there were a few people buying, but business was hardly brisk.

Looking back towards the mosque, Jiayuguan

Gone are the days when foreigners were routinely stared at in China; large clumsy people with round eyes and huge noses are a common sight on the streets of Beijing or Shanghai, but Jiayuguan is different. Some people seemed so interested in us that we wondered if we were the first westerners they had seen. Their interest, though, seemed friendly and the staring never felt hostile. We waved at children playing in the street and their parents smiled and waved back.

At the end of the market was an area of clean, narrow alleys with long rows of single storey barrack-like buildings. A caged songbird chirruped above every front door and bunches of chillies hung drying in the sun; it was a rare glimpse of an older China, a China that existed before the rush to modernisation and the mania for building high.

A glimpse of an older China, Jiayuguan

Beyond the houses we were we found another broad empty boulevard and beside it the unusual sight of a Christian church. Recently built, its style combined English parish church with American town hall, whilst suggesting the designer had never actually seen either. It sat beside the road in mildly embarrassed incongruity.

Church, Jiayuguan

Modern Jiayuguan is pleasant enough, in a rather characterless way. Keeping a watch on the gathering clouds and attempting to will them away, we tramped the streets looking doggedly for the Great Wall Museum marked in our Rough Guide, but never found it. The centre, slightly perversely, is on the western side, well away from the huge steelworks that dominate the north-eastern corner and explain why this ancient and once remote village is being developed into a modern town. Jiayuguan is a work in progress, but for the moment, it is welcoming, relaxed and mercifully free of crowds and beggars. The air, too, is clean by Chinese standards though current developments may yet see to that.

The centre of modern Jiayuguan

At 6 o'clock Mr Lu drove us out of town, then through agricultural land, negotiating his way round tractors and donkey carts, to the well-defined edge of the Gobi desert. It was as flat as Orlando had promised, a vast plain of grey grit stretching away to the distant mountains. The heat of the day was beginning to moderate, and the sky had become mercifully clear.

The eclipse was not until seven and we arrived just before the six thirty closing time of the Wei-Jin Underground Gallery, which is not a gallery at all, but a tomb. Over a thousand tombs were chiselled into this bleak landscape in the Wei and Jin period, but only one is available for public viewing.

The ‘Wei and Jin’ period, over fifteen hundred years ago, was the first time Jiayuguan had been incorporated into an entity which we would recognise as China. For 400 years, the Han dynasty had ruled a united China based on Xi’an that stretched south beyond the Yangzi basin and north along the Yellow River, but never this far north or west. When Han rule collapsed in 220 CE, China entered a period of disunity known as the ‘Three Kingdoms’. The kingdoms engaged in semi-continuous warfare, but around 265 AD the Jin dynasty emerged in the northernmost kingdom, and by 280 had largely reunified China and extended their rule to include the area around Jiayuguan.

Turkic invaders attacked the Jin's northern and western territories and by 386 Jiayuguan had became part of the Northern Wei Empire. The Wei-Jin tombs were constructed between the late 3rd and 5th centuries under both the Jin and the Northern Wei.

None of the other thousand tombs are visible to a casual glance, but the one we were to visit is easily  is crowned with a hut and a corrugated iron roof. The tomb keeper opened up and we descended a well-lit flight of stairs some four metres into the ground. At the entrance painted tomb guardians warned us off, but we took no notice and boldly entered. The tombs are built of flat, creamy coloured bricks, which form a complex vaulted ceiling. The sides of the two chambers are lined with bricks set on their edges, each one bearing an individual painting, hence the name ‘galleries’.

Photography was no allowed so I have 'borrowed' this picture from the website
of Chinese tour company Visit Our China in return for this free publicity

The brickwork is of a remarkable standard for the period; the paintings are too, although they are often negatively compared with the Buddhist paintings at Mogao (see Dunhuang: Dunes in the Gobi) and Bezeklik (see Turpan: Ruined Cities of the Silk Road). They are certainly less complex and the use of colour is more limited, but they perform a different function. The Buddhist paintings are entirely religious, and although it would be difficult to maintain that artwork in a tomb has no religious connotation, the Wei-Jin paintings are largely vernacular. There are no flying apsaras, representations of the Buddha or denizens of the underworld, instead there are dozens of vigorous line drawings showing aspects of daily life in the 5th century. We saw them ploughing, cooking, butchering a pig and playing musical instruments. The essentials of life have changed little in one and a half millennia.

We were still looking at the pictures when Orlando shouted down that the eclipse was starting. After her apparent indifference earlier, she now seemed beside herself with excitement. After delivering her Indian clients to an official eclipse viewing sites she had thought she was going to miss the event. The government had laid on a viewing area for some twenty thousand people at Hami, but although they had made great efforts to package and sell the eclipse, not even the Chinese Communist Party could actually own it. ‘Ownership’, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would have reminded them, ‘is theft’ and you cannot thieve an eclipse.

Using our eclipse glasses we could see that moon was just starting to overlap the sun. Mr Lu had smoke a piece of broken glass with his lighter to and was looking at the sky through that. The eclipse glasses were not only safer but more efficient so to general excitement we passed them to Mr Lu and then to Orlando and onto the tomb-warden. Our group of five was joined by three young men on bicycles, students from Lanzhou University on a cycling holiday. They also had no equipment for viewing the eclipse so our glasses were passed round the newcomers who made suitably awed noises.

Lynne shows Mr Lu her attempts to photograph the sun, with the tomb warden on her right, Orlando on her left
Wei Jin Tombs, Jiayuguan

The moon made slow progress and without using the glasses it was impossible to tell that anything was happening. A sneaky glance at the sun – medically inadvisable, but impossible to resist – showed nothing but the usual ball of fire; looking away, the desert seemed to be bathed in the normal quantity of light for seven o’clock on a summer evening.

The eight of us stood around chatting, taking turns with the eclipse glasses and admiring the photographic equipment of one of the Lanzhou students; you need - as we were shortly to discover - a camera of some quality to take meaningful pictures of an eclipse. Sadly we had no such camera.

The field of view was excellent, the sky was clear and the evening sun was not so high that we had to crane our necks. By the time the moon had achieved two thirds coverage and still nothing seemed to be happening, except through the eclipse glasses, I was beginning to wonder whether an eclipse was all it was cracked up to be.

So there is an eclipse happening -- could you tell from this picture?
Jiayugan

 To the unequipped observer the climax would have come almost without warning. As totality approached the light level suddenly dropped, blackness overwhelmed the sun leaving only a halo of fire, and from a single point on the circumference, a sudden blaze of light, the so-called ‘diamond ring effect’. Eight people's simultaneous intake of breath was easily audible.

The earth was dark; the sun a ball of infinite blackness hanging in a dark sky. The world slipped into a profound silence.

Despite our different backgrounds, we were all twenty-first century people, with the usual blasé approach to apparent miracles like cars, computers and digital cameras. We all understood the essentially very simple trick of nature we were watching, yet our common reaction was one of total awe. I can only imagine how the sudden darkness must have felt to our unsuspecting ancestors.

Totality lasted little more than a minute and then the world returned unhurriedly to life. I found myself breathless and disorientated. I looked round to see seven other faces, Chinese and European alike, struggling back to normality.

What do you do or say after the greatest free show on earth? None of us seemed to know, and for a while we stood in silence. We recovered more slowly than the world around us, but eventually we took leave of our new friends from Lanzhou and, although it was well past official closing time, the tomb warden invited us to see the second chamber.

The two coffins and the grave goods had long been removed, but there were more paintings to admire. When the tomb was completed and occupied, a candle had been lowered through a small hole in the apex of the vaulted ceiling. Then the hole was closed. By the time the candle burned out the corpses were sealed in an inert environment. I am not sure this was really much use to the dead, but it was good news for the archaeologists some fifteen hundred year later. The grave goods and other artefacts are in various museums, including the one on site - not that it was open. A less systematic grave robbing had taken place in earlier centuries, sometimes so neatly done that it has been suggested tomb builders and tomb robbers were actually the same people.

Next morning we dropped in on The Last Fort Under Heaven in the northwest of the city. There has probably been a fort here since Han times and the original settlement of Jiayuguan served the fort and was dependant on it. The current Ming structure was completed in1372.

Lynne at the Last Fort under Heaven
Jiayuguan

Two courtyards are surrounded by sturdy walls and surmounted by the standard flamboyant Ming gatehouses and guardhouses. There were quarters for the commander and a Buddhist temple for his spiritual needs. Just outside the fort is the new location of the museum we had failed to find the previous day.

The Commander's private temple
Last fort Under Heaven, Jiayuguan,

According to legend, the builders calculated they required 999,999 bricks. One million were duly delivered. The spare brick can be seen sitting on a ledge above the inner courtyard. You may believe that if you wish; easier to believe, given the pristine condition of the fort, is that it has been the victim of heavy-handed restoration.

The Last Fort Under Heaven
Jiayuguan

Inside one courtyard a squad of Ming soldiers – students with holiday jobs - were being put through complex drills. From a distance, they seemed to be slashing at each other with deadly weapons.....

Comples weapon drill
Last Fort Under Heaven, Jiayuguan

..... but close up the blades were reassuringly flimsy, the weapons little more than overgrown cutlery.

On guard with oversgrown cutlery
Last Fort Under Heaven, Jiayuguan

From the battlements the importance of the fort is obvious. At Jiayuguan the Hexi corridor bottle-necks before opening out into the Gobi desert. The Great Wall can be seen stretching out to the Qilian Mountains in the south and northwards to the smaller Mazong Mountains. The wall here is simple mud brick, not the elaborate structure it is near Beijing, but it does not need to be. No army or trade caravan approaching China from the West could pass the fort unseen. The Last Fort Under Heaven had total control over the frontier between civilization and barbarism.

The Great Wall stretches away to the Qilian Mountains
Jiayuguan

At various times, Chinese power and influence have spread several thousand kilometres west of here – as they do today. In those days sections of wall reached out into the desert to remote forts, now levelled by time or reduced to stumps in the sand. Later, when the Chinese withdrew into their heartland, this was their final frontier. Even today, beyond Jiayuguan the Han are a minority and many of the people could not be described as ethnically Chinese.

We walked through the fort and out the far side through the Last Gate Under Heaven. The Chinese call their country Zhong Guo, The Middle Land. Once through this gate, you were very much on the edge and no longer under the protection of heaven. Here weeping loved ones said goodbye to those bound for exile, and it still looks a frightening prospect today. Beyond the gate, there is nothing but desert, a bare, flat wilderness bounded only by the distant horizon. Only a gang of boys, each holding a camel on a lead and touting rides, brought any humanity to the scene. We walked back in, through the First Gate Under Heaven.

The First Gate Under Heaven
Jiayuguan

It is a fine fort, the walls and guardhouses more delicate than their heavier cousins in Xi’an, but it is recognisably from the same source. By the fourteenth century, Chinese civilization was far more developed than anything in Europe or anywhere else in the world. They were so far ahead they confused their achievements with perfection. They sat snugly, and indeed smugly, behind their wall and treated the rest of the world with disdain – if they bothered to think about it at all. A trip round any major museum will show that the incredibly advanced porcelain they were producing in the eleventh century was still being made in the seventeenth; that Chinese landscape painting became so stylised they seemed to be forever repeating the same picture. When you have seen one Ming palace you have seen them all, and their forts and their tombs. Once perfection is achieved, there can be no development. The Qing dynasty (1644-1911) saw some slight changes in fashion - furniture became a little heavier - but no change in mind set. By the time the Chinese looked over the parapet again, it was the twentieth century and to their horror, they found the barbarians had not only caught up, they had raced on ahead. It is only in the last three decades that the Chinese have woken up to what has happened. The current headlong rush for modernisation can only end with China playing a more important role in the world, a role that befits a nation with vast resources and a quarter of the world’s population.

It was eleven o’clock and Orlando suggested we go for lunch. We protested. ‘It was too early,’ we said, ‘wouldn’t it be better to set off for Dunhuang and find something on the way?’ Orlando said there was nothing on the way. In urban China it is difficult to walk a hundred metres without tripping over several restaurants, I found it difficult to believe we could drive several hundred kilometres without finding one, but Orlando was adamant (and would be proved right).

We sat in a restaurant, nibbling watermelon and waiting until our stomachs said lunch would be acceptable. Around us, the staff were clearing up after a Chinese coach party. There was an incredible quantity of waste and they were dumping whole plates of food, some of them completely untouched, straight into big buckets on the floor. There was no doubt that when we were ready to eat we would again receive enough for six. Orlando was keen to order for us and we had already primed her not to hold back on the chillies.

The meal, when it came, was as big as expected, the spicing mild, to say the least.

Lunch for two, Jiayuguan

‘It wasn’t too spicy for you?’ she asked anxiously as we left. ‘More chillies would be good,’ I said and watched her struggle to understand.

The Chinese Silk Road

Introduction: The Silk Road in China

Prelude: Shanghai

1 Xi'an

2 Jiayuguan: A Total Eclipse and the Last Fortress under Heaven

3 Dunhuang: Dunes in the Gobi

4 Turpan: Ruined Cities of the Silk Road

5 Kashgar (1):  The Sunday Market and the Former British Consulate

6 Kashgar (2): Upal, Abakh Hoja and the Old Town

7 Hotan (or Khotan or Hetian): City in the Desert

8 Urumqi: A By-word for Remoteness

Postscript

Xi'an: The Chinese Silk Road Part 1

Central Xi’an still sits contentedly within its massive fourteenth century walls, and it is this rather than the population – variously quoted at 3, 6 or 10 million - that makes it seem far less of a mega-city than Shanghai.

The airport is thirty kilometres from town. Four years ago we arrived in the evening and took a taxi along brand new motorways, deserted except for an army of toll collectors. We drove into the outer suburbs down a long straight road lined with low buildings. Outside every one was a group of snooker tables where young men practised potting in pools of orange light. This time we arrived just after lunch, an hour ahead of schedule, so we were pleased that Zhou Li, who would be our guide for the next day’s trip to the mountains, was already there to greet us. This time the roads were busier, but the tollbooths no less numerous. Zhou Li happily demonstrated that, had talking been an Olympic sport, she would easily have made the Chinese team and we had absorbed a long and informative lecture by the time we reached the city walls.



The walls form a perfect rectangle some 4km by 2km. The longer sides are orientated east-west, the shorter north-south, and the streets inside are laid out on a rigid grid. Here, if ever there was one, is a mathematician’s city. Built originally in 1370 of rammed earth, the walls were faced with brick in 1568. Being 12 metres high and 18 metres thick, the chances of not noticing them are minimal. A watchtower guards each corner and a fortress-like gate adorns each side. There were also drawbridges over a moat. The drawbridges have long gone but sections of the moat remain, their banks dotted with anglers. The state of the water would not encourage me to eat their catch.

 

Fishing in the moat, Xian 2004

The demands of modern traffic have created far more than the four original perforations in the wall, but it remains a formidable barrier, and getting into or out of the city at peak time demands more patience than most Chinese drivers want to show. Inside there is often gridlock, but building restrictions mean you do not feel lost at the bottom of a vast canyon.

The South Gate, Xian City Walls, 2004

It was on this site, a millennium and a half before the walls were built, that Qin Shi Huang established Changan, the first capital of his newly united China. The Emperor Qin is not an easy man to like. He was ruthless, as any successful warlord must be; he drove his people hard to build version one of the Great Wall, and when that was done, he drove them harder to build a vast army of terracotta figures to guard his tomb. We had seen the Terracotta Army on our earlier visit, but it is impossible to write about Xi’an without mentioning it. What is, perhaps, most remarkable is that you can see many examples of similar grave goods in the city’s Shaanxi Regional Museum. Men of power and influence were in the habit of taking small armies, their house and servants, even farmyards, complete with strutting cockerels and snuffling pigs, to their graves with them. But the others are dolls’ house size. Only Qin had an army of full sized soldiers, horses and chariots; only Qin had as many soldiers as a real army. What an ego!



Terracotta Warriors, Xian

Like many such monsters, he cowed not only his enemies but also his descendants, and soon after his death in 210 BC, the provinces rose in revolt. By 206, his heirs had been swept aside and the Han dynasty established. It was under the Han that Changan, became one of the world’s great metropolises.

The city was as large and powerful as contemporary Rome, and it was hardly surprising that these two great empires bracketing either end of the Eurasian landmass should establish trading links. Unlike Rome, the Chinese empire did not fall to barbarians and whilst Europe had its dark ages, Changan had its golden period. A Tang dynasty census in the eighth century recorded almost two million inhabitants, making it by far the world’s largest city.

Changan lost its status as China’s capital in the disunity that followed the fall of the Tang around 960. Under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) its name was changed from Changan (Perpetual Peace) to Xi’an (Western Peace). Given the warlike nature of some its rulers there is irony in the names, though today the main threat to peace comes from the incessant and unruly traffic.

The one major site we missed on our previous visit was the Bell Tower, not because we could not find it - it defines the centre of the city - but because it was covered in scaffolding and boarded up. This time it was open, so we paid our fee and climbed the steps from the underground shopping mall into the ancient tower.

The Bell Tower, Xian



The Bell Tower is a typical wooden construction of the Ming period, standing on a brick platform in the middle of a traffic island. It was built around the same time as the city walls were faced with brick. The tower’s original purpose was to hold a bell that was clanged at dawn, telling the citizens to rise. Facing it, two hundred metres across a paved park, is the Drum Tower. Here a drum was beaten to inform everybody that it was dusk and time to go home. Having two different towers with their two different sounds suggests that either Ming dynasty citizens could not tell dawn from dusk, or that somebody was interested in prestige building projects.

The Drum Tower, just across the 'park'
Xian

The walkway round the platform provides impressive views down the main traffic arteries of the city.

There is also a large bell, where Chinese children were queuing up to dress in Ming costume and pretending to hit it.

The Bell after the children had gone away
The Bell Tower, Xian

Inside, the carillon is impressive, though a modern copy of the original. The large bells are recognisably bell-shaped but the small ones could only be Chinese. After a glance at the exhibition upstairs we returned to the carillon for the hourly performance.



Two energetic young ladies struck the smaller bells whilst an older woman with a large stick strode around poking the larger bells at appropriate moments. Three more musicians played assorted stringed and wind instruments, one of them blowing into a complex array of pipes like a miniature church organ held in two hands. Finally, a couple of dancers arrived to add to the scene. To western ears, the sounds were strange, but pleasant, though the finale, a rendition of Auld Lang Syne, seemed deeply weird.

Blowing into a miniature church organ
The Bell Tower, Xian

For dinner we set off to eat Xiang Xiang Da Pan Ji (Fragrant, Fragrant Big Plate Chicken). The eponymous restaurant specialises in a dish involving a whole chicken chopped, roasted, placed on a bed of noodles and then covered in an aromatic sauce. It was mentioned in our guidebook and, more significantly, thoroughly recommended by our daughter and son-in-law, whose judgement I hold in high regard.

We jumped in a taxi and showed the Chinese characters to the driver. He thought for a moment, then shrugged and shook his head. ‘Changan Nan Lu’ I said, telling him the street. Unfortunately, it helps to be English to understand my Mandarin.

We returned to the hotel and asked the receptionist to write the street name in Chinese. ‘I don’t know this restaurant’ she said as she wrote.

Undaunted – well, partially daunted - we returned to the street and found another taxi. The driver looked no less perplexed than the first, but he set off heading purposefully south. Unfortunately, Changan Nan Lu is the main street heading out from the south gate and is several miles long. As an address, it was less than pinpoint.

After driving a decent distance beyond the gate, he slowed so that he could inspect the signs over the many shops and restaurants. Then he stopped and phoned his office. Apparently, nobody there knew this restaurant either. We drove on a bit more and then he phoned somebody else.

The driver was becoming distinctly uneasy. Deciding to put him out of his misery and cut our losses, we paid him off and clambered from the taxi. He felt under an obligation to complete the journey and by baling out we were making him lose face, but I could think of nothing else to do.

Changan Nan Lu is a wide thoroughfare and there were plenty of people about. Beside the road was a large open area, recently cleared of buildings, where an impromptu market was establishing itself. We had seen frequent excavations along the roadside and some considerable piles of rubble.

Changan Nan Lu, from the Bell Tower to the distant South Gate
Xian

We walked to the next corner where there was another line of restaurants, none of them called Xiang Xiang Da Pan Ji. A friendly local accosted us, asking what we were looking for. She too had never heard of the restaurant. She spoke to a couple of street traders and then a passer-by, but by now it was clear we were wasting our time. ‘Perhaps’ she said in impressive English, ‘it has gone.’ She gestured at the excavations and piles of rubble, ‘they are building a new metro line and many buildings have been demolished.’

We crossed a footbridge and walked a couple of blocks back north, but without much hope. There were plenty of restaurants, some looked inviting, but none were Xiang Xiang Da Pan Ji. We debated choosing one at random, but in the end took another taxi back to the centre.

On our first trip to China in 2004, we were fascinated by the way we found ourselves stepping from First World to Third and back again just by turning a corner or crossing a road. There was no better example than the 200 metre walk from the chic consumerism of the Century Ginwa Centre underneath the Bell Tower, to Xi’an’s Muslim quarter. That this brief stroll also involved passing the Ming elegance of the Drum Tower and a branch of McDonalds just added to the bizarre richness.

We took this walk again. In the evening the main street of the Muslim quarter offers an array of kebab stalls and other eateries, and if Xiang Xiang Da Pan Ji was off the menu, we would have a kebab.

Rounding the corner by McDonalds, we found ourselves confronted with a brand new brightly lit arch bearing the words ‘Welcome to Xi’an Islamic Street’. The Third World had receded since our last visit.

The rather tarted up Muslim  Quarter, Xian

There are Hui communities in most Chinese cities. Allegedly descended from Arab soldiers, they look much like any other Chinese except the men wear small white cylindrical hats and some of the women wear headscarves. There are thirty thousand Hui in Xi’an, living mainly in the tightly packed streets of the Muslim quarter and worshipping at the Great Mosque, a building Islamic in function but entirely Chinese in design.

Just as ‘Steak’ on a British menu implies ‘beef steak’, ‘meat’ in a Chinese menu implies pork. The Hui are not always the most observant of Muslims, but eating pork would be a step too far, and the default meat in the Muslim quarter is mutton. The scruffy street of grubby kebabis where we had eaten four years ago is now a brightly lit bazaar, with neat little kebab shops jostling for space with bigger, smarter, air-conditioned restaurants.



Eating kebabs in the Muslim quarter
Xian 2004

We pulled the meat from the scimitar-like skewers and ate it with flat Muslim bread at a table set up in the road – they did not want us in their little restaurant, they wanted us prominently displayed outside. The meat was tender and flavoursome and the Hui are relaxed enough about their religion to sell the beer needed to wash it down. We ate well, but it I was not Xiang Xiang Da Pan Ji.

The Bell Tower at night as we strolled back from the Muslim Quarter
Xian

Zhou Li arrived next morning to take us on our expedition to Hua Shan (Flower Mountain) one of China’s five sacred mountains. Hua Shan is 120km east of Xi’an and we set off along a motorway which could have taken us the whole 900km to the coast.

The land was remarkably flat, but we were expecting to find ourselves entering a more mountainous region soon. After 40km we by-passed a substantial city. ‘Where’s that?’ I asked Zhou Li. ‘Weinan,’ she replied, ‘it belongs to Xi’an’. Population figures quoted for Xi’an vary considerably this explained why. The city has, I think, 3 million people, then there is the metropolitan area and finally, to achieve the 10 million figure, they include the surrounding counties. Calling Weinan part of Xi’an is like calling Worcester part of Birmingham.

Over a 100Km into the journey, we were still in a broad, flat, plain. Hua Shan has five peaks shaped, if you have enough imagination, like the petals of a flower. All the peaks are around 2000m, rather too big, I thought, to hide in a heat haze.

We had left the motorway and almost reached the park area before a mountain loomed out of the mist.

There were plenty of places in the official car park and as many spaces at the official restaurant where we went for an early lunch. Zhou Li ordered for us after only the briefest consultation. The food was good, although her choices were a touch bland. There was also enough for six. She and the driver ate separately so we did our duty by polishing off a generous third of what was on the table but still felt uneasy about the quantity wasted. This is, however, the Chinese way. If guests eat all the food offered, then clearly they have not been given enough, so to avoid losing face the host must grossly over-provide. Being brought up in the aftermath of wartime rationing with the phrase ‘nice clean plate’ ringing in our ears, we had some cultural adapting to do.

Hua Shan, definitely the official place to start

The shuttle bus from the visitor centre wound up a narrow defile into what felt like the heart of the mountain. We all decamped at a small square and bought some more tickets, this time for the cable car. We joined a long queue of cheery Chinese in baseball caps and cowboy hats snaking their way through the metal barriers with encouraging speed.



The journey was spectacular. We swung over no huge spaces as you can in the Alps, but travelled up a rocky funnel and past huge vertical slabs of bare stone where the occasional tree had forced its way through a gap and was hanging on for dear life. We were among the precipitous faces and strange vegetation of Chinese landscape painting.
 

Through a rocky funnel
Huashan

I decided to speak to Zhou Li on the subject of food: ‘Is it true that the Chinese think all westerners hate chillies?’ I asked, realising as I spoke that by asking about perceptions rather than the truth of those perceptions I was burying a linguistic land mine under the conversation.

‘Yes,’ she answered, stamping firmly on the firing mechanism. Most Chinese tour guides speak excellent English and Zhou Li was one of the best. However, as very few have the opportunity to travel and mix freely with native speakers, their listening skills are often far less developed. This counts double when you are trying to explain something entirely contrary to all received wisdom.



Mountain Dwelling on a Summer's Day
by Wang Yuanqi (1642-1715)
National Palace Museum, Taipei

From the top of the cable car a series of paths led off in various directions, most of which could be described us ‘up’.



From the top all paths lead up
Huashan

 

None of the signs meant anything to us, so we chose a path at random and strolled along it. After a while the way narrowed into a groove cut into the rock face with a chains on the outer edge; the stream of people going our way negotiating passing places with the stream coming the other. After this the path widened until we reached a broad rock platform. The only way forward now was up a vertical face into which had been carved a set of a dozen steps, each 50cm high and the width one’s toes. Chains had been draped down the cliff and every man in China, his wife, children and grandmother was shinning up and down as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Lynne did not look at the obstacle for long. ‘No chance!’ she said, which conveniently let me off the hook.

We retraced our steps and tried another route. This soon involved an airy ridge of bare rock guarded by low chains on either side. Although exposed it was wide enough to be completely safe, though not quite wide enough to feel completely safe. ‘No chance!’ said Lynne again with a tone of absolute certainty.

An airy ridge of bare rock
Huashan

We did, however, get an excellent view of the ‘Heavenward Ladder’ over the intervening gorge. This kilometre long ladder is tacked onto a bare spine of rock leading to the North Peak. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people were swarming up and down what looked from our distance to be a totally exposed, near vertical, set of wooden steps.
 

The Heavenward Ladder, Huashan

We never made it to any of the peaks, but we did enjoy wandering around, looking at the views and peering into the precipitous depths. We came across several stalls selling cold drinks and pieces of watermelon and a few old men staggering round under carry-poles transporting the goods to the stalls. To minimise costs some of them carry these loads all the way from the villages at the foot of the mountain - a very hard way to earn a very meagre living.

We rejoined Zhou Li at the cable car terminal where an old man was leaning on his carry-poles singing Chinese folk songs. He had a strong, clear voice and we stayed to listen. Doubtless, he made more from his singing than his carrying, although when it came to collecting money he looked almost embarrassed.

On the way down we were joined in our car by four young men who had been up the mountain early and had done all five peaks. Though obviously full of youth and vigour, they had no special clothing or equipment. They told us they had heard of a fatal fall from one of the paths earlier in the day. Maybe the rumour was not true, but it probably was. I hoped the cable car engineers took safety a little more seriously than their clients.

Just one of the five peaks, Huashan

 

At the bottom, the queue for the cable car was several times bigger than when we went up, though still boisterous and cheerful.

From the point of view of conquering peaks, our day had been a failure, but it had been an enjoyable and very typically Chinese day out. Of course, Chinese people do go to see the Terracotta Warriors and the other major sites, but they are on the itinerary of every tour group, so European and American visitors usually outnumber the locals. This concentration of wealth attracts the most desperate street traders who see tourists only as walking wallets. The combination of aggressive traders and rich people pathologically frightened of being ripped off brings out the worst in both cultures. It also generates an army of tour managers dedicated to shielding foreigners from unwanted attentions and effectively keeping them in tourist ghettoes. Hua Shan, on the other hand, attracts few westerners and no rip-off merchants. Travelling as ordinary people among ordinary people, we met only cheerfulness, helpfulness and courtesy – not to mention a frightening disregard for personal safety.



More rocks like a landscape painting
Huashan

Xi’an railway station occupies what should be a section of the wall, but at a time when the walls represented nothing but the bad old imperial days, 500m were removed to make way for the trains. Today this looks a poor decision but there is no way back. Next morning our cases passed through the X-ray machines without question and, with a little help from Zhou Li, we found our way to the soft sleeper waiting room and then, but only after the train had arrived, onto the platform. The Chinese, often so cavalier about health and safety, never let a passenger onto a platform when a train is coming in or going out.

We settled into our four-berth compartment and waited to see who our travelling companions would be. Having travelled this way throughout China, Russia and Mongolia, we have had some pleasant and interesting companions, and, so far, no bad experiences.

A few minutes before departure time we were joined by a respectable looking middle-aged couple.

‘Ni hao,’ we said.

‘Not Ni hao,’ the man replied, ‘we are Japanese.’

Sadly, they spoke little English and after ‘sayonara’, my only Japanese consisted of unhelpful words like ‘kamikaze’ and ‘hara-kiri’. International relations were, however, maintained by a great deal of smiling and the exchange of English biscuits and Japanese raisins.

After a while, the man got out his map and told us they were going to Zhangye. I pointed out Jiayuguan, the next town on the line, as our destination.

‘You know Tunku?’ he asked.

I shook my head, the name was unfamiliar. He rifled in his bag, produced a Japanese guidebook and showed me pictures of huge sand dunes. It looked suspiciously like Dunhuang. I suggested this, but it meant no more to him than ‘Tunku’ had to me.

He returned to the map. ‘Tunku’ he said, pointing out a small town. Underneath the Chinese characters he was reading as ‘Tunku’ was the pinyin word ‘Dunhuang’. I told him we were going to ‘Tunku’ after Jiayuguan and it looked very interesting. They had obviously been discussing this earlier, and after a little more debate they decided to skip Zhangye and go straight to Dunhuang.

I was unsure if you could change a ticket once you were on the train, but he called the carriage attendant and opened negotiations. It became clear that his Mandarin was no better than his English, but he was not prepared to give up easily. Pulling out a pad, he wrote some characters on it. The carriage attendant nodded and wrote an answer. A written conversation followed, as if between two deaf people.

I was unsure of how conclusive the negotiation had been, but I was impressed that it had happened at all.

‘You cannot speak Chinese, but you can write it?’ I asked. ‘Yes, a little,’ he said ‘is similar Japanese.’

I have always found it amazing that Mandarin and Cantonese, two completely distinct languages, are identical when written. The same is true of the various, quite different, dialects spoken across China, which explains why all television programmes are subtitled. Although my Japanese friend read two symbols as ‘Tunku’ and the Chinese carriage attendant read them as ‘Dunhuang’ that did not indicate they had different meanings. Chinese and Japanese, it seems, share enough characters to enable some limited communication; and communication there had surely been as for the next few hours our companions were visited by a succession of self-important people with peaked caps - a type never in short supply on a Chinese train.

 

The Chinese Silk Road

 

Introduction: The Silk Road in China

Prelude: Shanghai

1 Xi'an

2 Jiayuguan: A Total Eclipse and the Last Fortress under Heaven

3 Dunhuang: Dunes in the Gobi

4 Turpan: Ruined Cities of the Silk Road

5 Kashgar (1):  The Sunday Market and the Former British Consulate

6 Kashgar (2): Upal, Abakh Hoja and the Old Town

7 Hotan (or Khotan or Hetian): City in the Desert

8 Urumqi: A By-word for Remoteness

Postscript